Hello Product Hunters 👋
delighted to introduce the community to the second instance of our exploration around memory and meaningful experiences of them through pictures.
💡 Here's the idea
The goal is to design meaningful experiences in relation to digital pictures - which tend to feel quite empty (take it and forget, maybe watch it from time to time when Google reminds you, that’s it).
This idea builds on two levels, two assumptions:
we take and receive too many meaningless pictures, we are bad a sorting, ordering and deleting, and that’s a vicious cycle that turns galleries in unappetizing messes.
What makes pictures meaningful is context. The problem with context is that it is obvious when taking the picture, but almost impossible to gather in hindsight.
Part 1 of TOTEM: An assistant prompts you every day, summarizing the number of pictures you took, the number of pictures you received (e.g. through Whatsapp, Telegram, ...) and if you accept, you go through them together, Tinder-style (swipe right for good pictures, left for bad ones you can delete right away, swipe up to highlight, or archive).
Great! you’re now creating an habit to keep you gallery clean and more meaningful.
Part 2 of TOTEM: At the end of the week, the assistant prompts you for a weekly review. It shows you 7 empty “shelves”, for each day one. You get to choose the highlight picture for each day, among the ones you pre-selected for that day. Now comes the twist: you chose the picture of the day, wanna tell me why, asks the assistant? (something as friendly and chat-like. The sort of questions you would ask yourself looking back. A few examples:
What were you doing?
What were you feeling?
why did you take a picture?
Were you listening to any specific song?
Or something more open ended, like: tell me more about that event, or day?
You have the option to leave a voice memo, or to type a short text, or maybe you already told someone about this, would you like to copy a message you wrote on Whatsapp, or insert a voice-memo you exchanged with someone?
The goal here is to give context and meaning in the lightest way. Ideally, it should have the immediate benefit of create awareness/reflection.
Benefit 1: more awareness, more consciousness about the experience as you experience it (or shortly after). This is a similar idea to your lambda mindfulness approach - but it’s cooler than a journal app because it builds on specific pictures, that makes it easier and more tangible.
Benefit 2: At the end of the month or year, not unlike Revolut and Spotify, you get a review.
Bonus benefit:
A pristine gallery, cleaned and sorted everyday.
Only instead of a random series of pictures like Google Fotos sends you - they are the highlights you chose (and maybe forgot), and they are complemented with personal comments
This project aims to bridge the gap between 2 extremes:
1 second everyday has an amazing result in form of a super emotional video of the year, but the process is frankly thankless - it’s mostly an annoyance everyday.
on the other side of the spectrum: journaling, creates value through mindfulness and clarity, self-awareness - but in 1 month, these scribbles are pretty worthless (hardly anyone re-reads journal entries).
Here you would have something creating value in the moment, but also in hindsight, making it fun to re-experience or even to share, creating the “experience” of digital pictures through selection and added-meaning.
What do guys think? Excited about any thought or feedback!
LaCollage